How to reduce plastic injection tooling cost

How to reduce plastic injection tooling cost

You may inquiry with lots of plastic injection tooling suppliers, but you received big difference for injection tooling cost. So what you can do to choose the right plastic injection tooling supplier. To choose the injection tooling factory based on the price is not the only solution. We will talk about the how to have a professional inquiry for injection tooling today.

What will affect the plastic injection tooling cost?

1. Plastic injection tooling life,

This is the estimated total quantities that the injection tooling is possible to shot. Normally if it mass production injection tooling, SEASKYTOOLING will undertake the mold life. For the prototype mold and low volume production injection tooling, we will choose mold life as your demand.

Why plastic injection tooling life affect the tooling cost?

As different mold life with different mold steel. For example, if you just need 1000 pcs to shot simple ABS plastic enclosure, you can choose S50C(1055, 1.1730) or aluminum etc. reasonable steel to build the whole mold.

Your mold supplier may consider different profit for different mold, this is one of factor probably.

Normally, silicone, NBR and EPDM compression molding will not consider the mold life to offer various mold cost thanks to the mold structure is simple.

2. Quantities for plastic products each order,

The production quantities affect the tooling cost, if you have large volume production, you tooling supplier may charge your lower mold cost as injection molder can have the profit from the production.

Till now, there are more and more plastic injection molders do not trust the buyer with large volume production as lots of buyer did not have the large volume production as estimated.

3. Different color for plastic injection molding,

If you have different color demand, please offer this to your plastic molder as this will affect the cost whatever if your molder mind this or not. If you offer this, you will prevent to have argument during cooperation.

If it is compression molding process, the different color does not affect the cost a lots. But please offer different color for the compression molding too.

4. Mold layout affect the injection tooling cost,

Single cavity and multiple cavities,

With single cavity, you have less mold cost, but more expensive on production cost.

With multiple cavities, you have more expensive mold cost, but less expensive on production cost.

Family mold layout,

Sometimes family mold own both reasonable mold cost and unit price, but you should produce the parts together.

You can also have runner switch to control what parts should be produced, this means you have more expensive unit price, sometime it is more expensive unit price than to make separated mold.

5. Different surface finishing affect injection tooling cost,

If it is mirror polishing, you had better to use stainless mold steel. Otherwise you may not have high quality mirror surface on your plastic product if you choose the worse steel.

If it is EDM finishing, polishing lower than SPI A3, or texture, than you have lots of choice for mould steel. You can choose the mould steel based on your mold life.

This is one of major to offer different mold cost. Sometimes the mould steel is not the major cost for a injection tooling. For complex mold with sliders and lifter etc. , there are more chance that the mold cost on mold making but not on mold steel.

7. Even if you specified the mold steel, the mold steel from Supplier is not the same.

For example, if you specify P20, there are lots of P20 such as Finkl P20, LKM 2311 etc. They are not the same price. We have guidance to choose mold steel in China. If you sign our newsletter, you may receive the document.

Export mold is the mold to export from China to your local Country for injection molding. Different mold base steel and component have large difference on the price. On below video, you will find out what cause the mold base price difference. Also not all of China mold supplier can handle the export mold manufacturing.

9. You already knew different supplier offer different price.

If you did not have same specification for your vendor to offer, than you have different price. Also you supplier offer the plastic injection tooling cost based on different specification. This means plastic molder offer cost based on the different your demand your molders understood.

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